Catalan Modernism

Catalan Modernism is an art movement of the 1888–1911 period. The gallery holds 16 works in this movement, including works by Florine Stettheimer, Marc Chagall and Ramon Casas. Browse Catalan Modernism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Catalan Modernism — Modernisme in Catalan — was the architectural, artistic and literary movement that flourished in Catalonia, and above all in Barcelona, between roughly 1888 and 1911. Its conventional starting point is the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition, which gave the prosperous, industrialising city both a stage and a building boom; its close is often fixed at the death of the poet Joan Maragall in 1911. Modernisme was the artistic arm of a broader Catalan cultural reawakening, the Renaixença, channelled into a distinctly modern, cosmopolitan and faintly anti-bourgeois sensibility. It was the local sibling of Art Nouveau in France, Jugendstil in Germany and the Vienna Secession, drawing too on the English Arts and Crafts movement, yet it carried a charge that those movements lacked: an assertion of Catalan national identity.

Visually the movement is defined by the triumph of the curve over the straight line, asymmetry, and a dense vocabulary of vegetal and organic ornament. Architects fused new industrial materials — iron, glass, exposed brick — with traditional craft trades such as ceramics, stained glass, mosaic and wrought iron. The towering figures are Antoni Gaudí, whose Sagrada Família, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà are its emblems, alongside Lluís Domènech i Montaner (Palau de la Música Catalana, Hospital de Sant Pau) and Josep Puig i Cadafalch.

In painting the movement was led from the café table. Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol, both seasoned in Montmartre, helped found Els Quatre Gats, the tavern opened in 1897 in Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Martí that became Modernisme's social and creative hub. Casas's poster-flat, boldly drawn "Ramon Casas and Pere Romeu on a Tandem" (1897), replaced in 1901 by the same pair in a motor car, hung over its patrons; his Parisian "Bal du Moulin de la Galette" and Rusiñol's "The Kitchens of the Moulin de la Galette" record their French years. Rusiñol, working from his Sitges retreat Cau Ferrat, brought Symbolism and a near-religious ideal of "total art"; landscapists Joaquim Mir and Eliseo Meifrén pushed colour toward near-abstraction.

Modernisme gave way after 1906 to the cooler, classicising Noucentisme, but its afterlife is immense: it reshaped Barcelona's Eixample, several monuments are UNESCO-listed, and the young Picasso — who held an early show at Els Quatre Gats — passed through its orbit before moving on.